A cell phone recovered from the ashes of the 2010 eruption of Mount Merapi. At least 200 people died and some 390,000 were evacuated.

This man is shaman in the village of Banaran Keningar and claims to communicate with the Merapi volcano.

This man was injured in an earthquake in Central Java, Indonesia in 2006. He has been in a wheelchair ever since and drives to work in a scooter.

A souvenir of the Merapi volcano.

A man demonstrates how his grandfather wrapped himself in a bamboo cover to survive a Merapi eruption in 1930.

A worker mines sulfur in the Ijen crater in in East Java.

A tsunami alarm tower looms in the distance on Bali.

A tsunami drill at a school in the village of Jambaran, Bali. Students play injured or dead as others rescue them.

An earthquake-proof house in a "Teletubby village," built after an earthquake destroyed an older village nearby on Java.

Indonesia is a gorgeous archipelago of 13,700 islands dotting the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It's also incredibly vulnerable to natural disasters. There are 150 active volcanos, plus countless earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides, wildfires, and floods. But for the 260 million people who call the islands home, living under constant threat of catastrophe is downright ordinary.

Miguel Hahn and Jan-Christoph Hartung explore this reality in their fascinating series Beauty and the Beast. The images show how Indonesians deal with the potential threats around them, from scientists studying the seismic activity of volcanoes to elderly locals living in danger zones. “One guy told us that years ago when there was an alarm, he used to run," Hartung says, "but now he doesn’t even react because most of the time it’s a false alarm.”

Indonesia is located in the Ring of Fire, a region in the Pacific Ocean where colliding tectonic plates produce most of the world's volcanos and earthquakes. An average of 289 natural disasters occurs in Indonesia every year, costing thousands of lives and billions of dollars. After an earthquake and tsunami killed more than 170,000 Indonesians in 2004, the government launched a disaster management agency and established early warning systems to detect impending catastrophes. It also installed sirens, built evacuation shelters, mapped escape routes, and trained civilians on how to act in emergencies.

Hahn and Hartung, who live in Berlin, became interested in Indonesia's catastrophe prevention in 2015 when they read a book about the country. They spent two months in the region, documenting disaster-related infrastructure that surrounded them — "tsunami ready" hotels, evacuation signs, and alarms. They also chatted with locals about what it was like to live on the islands and were surprised at some people's insistence to tough things out.

One man who lives near the Merapi volcano refused to evacuate his village during an eruption because his grandfather survived one decades earlier. Many people reside in danger zones, making their living from the mountain a few miles away. Farmers grow coffee and produce in the ash-enriched soil, miners collect sulfur and volcanic sand for construction and guides ferry tourists around in jeeps to see the lava flow. "They’re not afraid of it," Hahn says. "It’s the base of their living because it’s so fertile and has many benefits. Sometimes they say the volcano is working, not exploding or erupting."

Hahn and Hartung shot with a Canon 5D Mark II they passed back and forth, illuminating their subjects with an off-camera flash. The artificial light, coupled with the unusual subject matter, makes everyone look like an actor on a stage. “It’s reality," Hahn says, "but it feels a little bit off and weird.”